Artwork ousted after protest

A photomontage by artist Sheila Pinkel has been removed from an art exhibition at the California Department of Corrections in Diamond Bar after parole agents objected to the work’s content, exhibition curator Patrick Merrill said Wednesday.

The show, “100 Years of Parole,” opened July 21 at the T.H. Pendergast California Parole Museum, located inside an administrative building in the Diamond Bar facility. The one-room museum, a nonprofit, is dedicated to the California parole system. Paul Toma, a parole agent, is chairman of the museum’s board of directors.

Called “Incarceration,” Pinkel’s 9-by-12-foot work is a multi-panel politicized history of incarceration in the U.S. The work was too large for the museum space and so was hung in a training room for parole officers, with the permission of Jeff Fagot, the Regional Parole Department head, Merrill said.

Fagot requested that it be removed, Merrill said, when “a couple of agents” complained about parts of it, specifically a pre-Civil War image of a slave’s whipped back and a World War II-era depiction of a Japanese man about to be shipped to an internment camp. The work was shown at the July 21 exhibition opening, then was covered and taken down Monday.

“It makes me sad,” Pinkel said. “The idea that they couldn’t handle dialogue about the incarceration system is antithetical to everything I believed was the case about the institution of parole.”

Fagot had not returned phone calls made to his office by press time Wednesday.

“Incarceration” was part of “Nexus,” a 2004 group show at Cal Poly Pomona’s Kellogg University Art Gallery, curated by Merrill, the gallery’s director.